My office isn’t really an office. The days of closed doors, private spaces, a little couch and wet bar, are gone. I work in a cubicle, a narrow pen lined up beside other narrow pens containing my colleagues, their computers, and their ambitions.
The upside of this arrangement is the easy transfer of information. We can communicate without barriers (projects get completed in record time!). The downside of this arrangement is the easy transfer of information (private phone calls are no longer private).
So it is pretty much known around my office that I like to cook. Occasionally, a friend will drop by to talk about what’s going on in his or her kitchen.
The other day I heard a most fascinating tale. A friend said that she likes to make a roast chicken on a Sunday night and eat just the crispy skin for dinner. Just the skin, and all of it. She’ll tuck into it just in time for the start of “Mad Men.”
Crispy skin is, of course, the holy grail of roasting a chicken, but I’ve long given up on eating it. With two kids to feed, it’s like stop-motion animation around my house getting the food to the table. It takes forever. I’m lucky if my chicken is still hot by the time I eat it, never mind if the skin is still crispy.
Recently, my friend and I were discussing ways of roasting a bird. She was telling me that she crosses the approaches of Julia Child (“butter ‘er up, stuff ‘er with lemon and sage”) and the Parisian restaurant Chez Louis (“start at a super high heat, then lower. Baste with broth”). I don’t have much time for such refinements. I have only one trick to making a chicken-skin crispy, and it’s a sure fire one. I use it every time. I learned it from reading “D'Artagnan's Glorious Game Cookbook.” (D'artagnan, by the way, is a fantastic supplier of everything from chickens to the fanciest of wild game birds. You can learn more here.)
I told her to put the chicken in the roasting pan the morning before cooking and let it sit, uncovered, in the refrigerator before roasting it at a high heat, about 450 degrees. The skin dries out (“desiccated,” was her apt and wild-eyed description this morning when she stopped by to tell me it was “the best chicken ever”) and the skin gets wicked crispy. You can’t lose.
My favorite roast-chicken recipe is here.